Office 365

Microsoft’s Office 365 service is an online service more like Google G Suite than the Microsoft Office software that you have traditionally installed onto your PC.

There are different levels of service, but they are all paid-for. Some are aimed at home users, others at business users. Some offer just email service, others online versions of Word, Excel etc, and others include both of those as well as licences for the traditional software that you can install on your PC.

Administering Office365

Some of Office365’s administrative options are accessible via the web using the “Office365 Portal” but others are available only via a command line interface.

Once you have installed both of those applications, you’ll see a new icon on your Start menu called “Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell”:

Logging into the Powershell system to administer Office365

To make use of the Powershell system, first open the shortcut highlighted above by single left-clicking on it. You’ll see the following, fairly uninviting and quite intimidating, screen:

To do anything at all, we need to log in. To do that, type Connect-MsolServiceNote:

for all of these commands, you can copy and paste them, however, even that isn’t straight forward. You can’t press CTRL+V to paste into the Powershell window – you must right click and then select Paste. If you press CTRL+V, you’ll just get a ^V symbol and that won’t do anything.Once you’ve typed Connect-MsolService, press enter and a popup window will open, asking for your Office365 administrator login name (that’ll be your main Office365 email address) and your password (the same you’d use to log into webmail for that address):

Once you are logged in, you’ll just see a new line in the Powershell window – there’s no party or congratulations here!

Set your password never to expire

By default, Office365 forces you to change your password every 90 days. As you can’t re-use a password again either, typically people end up having a password like Purp!eButt3rfly and then each time they’re forced to change it they’ll change to Purp!eButt3rfly1, then Purp!eButt3rfly2, then Purp!eButt3rfly3 etc… writing down which is the current one.

I’m not really a fan of that: changing passwords from one secure password to another is good in an ideal world, but people don’t behave ideally.

You can’t use the Office365 admin portal to turn off the default “force new password” option, but we can do it using Powershell. Here’s how.

First you need to have installed the Powershell applications to your PC, then you need to have logged into your Office365 account, then:

That tells us that the username yourname@yourdomain.comdoesn’t have a password that never expires (otherwise it’d say True on the right hand side, under PasswordNeverExpires) – and that’s how things are by default. Every 90 days, that user will be prompted to change their password.

As there is no confirmation that anything changed, we can repeat the first command we gave, to check the password status.

You could retype your command, but a shortcut is to press the “up cursor key” on your keyboard – that’s the arrow pointing upwards in the block of four arrow keys on the bottom right of your keyboard. Pressing the up/down keys cycles through the previous commands you’ve entered, so if you press ‘up’ twice you’ll see the Get-MSOLUser | Select UserPrincipalName, PasswordNeverExpirescommand again: press Enter to run it.

This time we see this:

So what we’ve done is we listed the users with passwords that never expire (and saw none), then told Office365 never to expire the password for yourname@yourdomain.com, then we listed the users with passwords that never expire again – and this time we have a ‘True’ next to our address.

Our password for the Office365 account will now never expire.

For more information on this topic, see Microsoft’s online help here. They show how to reverse this change, and how to make this change to ALL users, not just the specific one we did here.

Remote Support

To start a remote desktop support session, click this button.

If you're looking for the "unattended client", click this button:

Telephone Support

Telephone number 020 3411 4445 (UK) +44 20 3411 4445 (Int’l)

Hours of business Open 9am – 5.30pm UK time, mobile number available for out of hours tech support.

About Digital Red

Digital Red provides small businesses, home workers and individuals with friendly and professional technical support on all aspects of IT and PC use. Digital Red is based north west of London in Ruislip.